Twitter Tip: Find Your Tweet Equation

Article Last Updated: March 14, 2011 by Craig Smith

To be a true Social Media Influencer, you need to be engaging while offering something of perceived value to your followers. Twitter is the best example of how you need to balance sharing and responding to build a loyal following. To do this, you need to calculate your Tweet Equation.

Your Tweet Equation is the combination of your Twitter activities (Sharing original content, retweeting other’s content and responding to others) that add up to your Twitter success. Most of the highly successful Twitter influencers have found a way to balance these three key Twitter activities.

Sharing Original Content: When you use social media, you are building your personal brand. Sharing original content is critical because it shapes your brand and establishes your interests. Whether you are posting a personal story or sharing an article you just read, you are constantly establishing a bond with your followers as they are getting to know you on a bit of a more personal level.

Of course, you can very easily share too much on twitter. Always be guarded about what you are posting about your personal life as you never know who is reading your tweets.

Retweeting Other’s Content: Retweeting content serves a number of purposes. First and foremost it allows you to share quality content that you found interesting while giving the original tweet the proper credit. Retweeting also helps you get noticed by specific Twitter users that you find interesting and would like to interact with more in the future.

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A word of caution with retweeting: no matter how much you like and trust the original content provider, always read the article before you retweet it. Once you tweet it, you own the article and you have recommended it to hundreds of millions of people. Be careful!

Responding to Others: Responding to others is one of the most critical activities in building a large, loyal Twitter following. If someone mentioned you, asked you a question, retweeted your content, recommended you to others, etc, you should be responding to them and thanking them. It is proper etiquette, but it also shows that you care what they are saying and that you are willing to engage with them.

A quick reminder that if you are responding to something negative that was said about you or your brand, thank before you tweet. You don’t want to earn a bad reputation by escalating a negative situation.

Everyone has a different Tweet Equation. Obviously, the amount of opportunities you have to respond to followers will be proportionate to how much you share and retweet. The key is to find the proper tweet balance. You don’t want to share too much original content and garner the reputation of being a Twitter Broadcaster. By the same token, you don’t want to spend 100% of your time retweeting others and win the reputation of not having an opinion of your own. Finally, if you start proactively mentioning your followers without reason, you will quickly become known as a spammer.

Good luck in finding your Tweet Equation. It will take some time, but you will fall into your zone soon enough if you just stay mindful that you need Twitter balance to succeed.